Demanding a Voice? Worker Participation in the British Interwar Management Movement

It is often assumed that industrial sociology scarcely existed as a topic of study before the Second World War. Here, we illuminate its antecedents by showing social relations in work organisations being vigorously debated by workers and managers in the Rowntree lecture conferences, an integral part of the British interwar management movement (1918–1939). The reported debates and discussions constitute a form of ‘citizen sociology’. We explore the movement, previously examined solely from management’s viewpoint, from the workers’ perspective, accessing their lived experience through first-hand accounts provided in lectures. Our main contribution is to show how employee demands were progressively neutralised over the period, absorbed into nominally shared concerns for efficiency, as welfare provision was reconceived as labour management. We document this evolution through the lectures, expressed in participants’ own words. This was achieved not by disregarding worker representatives, but counter-intuitively by engaging with them directly and inviting them into the conferences.